


pick up this petty pace

by brawltogethernow



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, Grief/Mourning, Major Character Undeath, Missing Scene, the archive warning is up to interpretation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 09:53:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15168119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brawltogethernow/pseuds/brawltogethernow
Summary: Tarvek gets rid of Anevka's body.





	pick up this petty pace

During one of her daily checkups, Tarvek is strangely silent for a long time.

“Everything alright back there?” Anevka calls over to him. These checkups are _incredibly_ tedious, barely mitigated by Tarvek’s usual stream of banter. She wants to get on with it and carry on with her day: She has ever so many things to do. Schemes to scheme, people to influence. Science or no, this routine is leaving her bored and fidgety. And a lady _never_ fidgets.

“...Nothing unexpected,” says Tarvek. There’s a scraping sound, like he’s moving something heavy. Today the palanquin is separated from her by a veritable wall of machinery and devices, so that her brother can get it close to fiddly bits he needs.

His head pops back up from behind the mess, his shock of scarlet hair the same color her real hair is. “You can go now,” he says. He turns to her gaggle of footmen. “Be careful with her or we’ll have you for parts, etcetera etcetera, you know the drill.”

They’re already scooping up the palanquin, easing the tubes connecting it to her straight. They were not picked for _their_  bantering, that’s for sure.

“Lovely,” purrs Anevka. “I’ve been ever so impatient. There’s a breakfast in the Alarmingly Fuchsia Room, and I want to be there already attending to it before those friends of Father’s that are visiting arrive. Are you coming with?”

“I’ll be along in a little bit,” says Tarvek.

-§-

Tarvek checks Anevka's pulse, as he does routinely early in every checkup.

When he realizes what he’s feeling, he snatches his hand away.

Then he grabs the arm again. He’s a damn scientist, isn’t he?

It doesn’t — it doesn’t feel like the dead meat he knows it is. It feels like his sister’s arm, just too unresponsive, and parts of his brain less anchored in the moment quietly clamor at him to do something. To shake her, to fetch help. To demand someone do something. To release the scream lurking like a wasp’s nest at the bottom of his throat.

Instead, he detaches everything — a light fugue makes quick work of the parts that weren't constructed to detach — drags the medical container out of its seat in the palanquin, hauls a phrenological engine into it to compensate for the weight, and sends the clank that thinks it is his sister and the footmen away.

-§-

Though until today Anevka’s body lived, it has been a long time since it wasn’t vastly wrong. It has been empty of presence, working incorrectly, and was unsettling for it.

As time passed it grew harder and harder to coax glimpses of his sister from it, and he’s been giving up on it as impossible, slowly, in inches, the process halted only by a last coal of hope sunk somewhere deep in his breast, strong as adamant and unable to be extinguished.

Now it still can’t go out, but is unable to coexist with the reality he inhabits, and the contradiction is hurting him.

His thoughts won't stop going over and over revivification procedures he should do and should have done, frantic and obsessive, seeking anything new, any hidden solution. But there's nothing.

He’s got to dispose of her before she rots. There isn’t going to be a funeral. He’s always known that if this happened there wouldn’t be, so he tries to skirt the yawning chasm of unease he feels regardless of the mental preparation, to stamp out the guilt that persists despite there being no other truly viable options. He grabs around for things he’ll need to get her out of there with the least mess. His hands are shaking.

He needs a tarp, and finally finds something that will do. It’s reusable and not something he was planning on taking out of rotation any time soon, but he needs something and it is here.

He can’t stop turning back and staring at her dead face. Memorizing this sight even though he knows he shouldn’t, that this will be easier to remember than how she ever was alive and that he doesn’t want that. It feels like he owes it to her. He didn’t stop this: Now he has to look on what he’s done and feel it hurt.

She’s leaking. From the ports that connected her to the puppet clank, and a steady drip of bloody mucus from her nose. Her eyes are hooded, and it looks oddly dramatic. Not wrong enough, like dead eyes should, a dramatic sweep of eyelash over dark irises.

He reaches out to close them, like people do in novels. He prods at her pale eyelids. They don’t budge, already too set, and he withdraws his hand quickly before — before his attempts mess her up.

Breathing harshly, he lays the tarp out on the ground.

He pulled on gloves before he started. He’s been doing that habitually for a while. Caring for her — for her dying body; he knows, empirically now, that it was dying — has been messy.

He should do tests, to suss out what exactly caused her to die. But he...doesn’t want to. He’s not like Anevka, and isn’t able to detach himself from the reality that he’s working on a loved one like she could.

He hauls her body up in what should be something like a bridal carry, but she’s already gone too stiff to accommodate that. The muscles in his arms shake a little as he tries to support the weight without touching her with more than his hands. She droops in all the wrong ways and fails to accommodate the hold ditto, like a rubber doll full of gelatin.

He places her on the tarp. He tries to make it graceful, respectful and appropriately dignified, but dead bodies don’t lend themselves to dignity, so she goes down ungainly, stiff and limp in all the wrong places.

There’s no closure to be found here, but he has to do _something,_  so he reaches out and lays one hand tenderly on her head for a moment. He tries to take the moment in — the hair right, but the stiff coolness under it wrong, and he was right: There’s no reverence or familiarity to be had here. Then he folds the tarp over her.

He slides the bundled up body into a large bag a machine came in. He doesn’t really have anything perfect for this, but he can’t use the tools in the castle actually meant for such an occasion without drawing attention to the fact that he has a body. And then he’d have to make up a weak story, and he doesn’t want to.

He picks the bag up, letting the weight rest on his chest this time. His body feels odd and numb. His sister’s body is in his arms. It feels like there’s something wrong with them, like there’s acid racing up and down underneath his skin.

Then he’s occupied briefly with the issue of getting the door open without dropping her. He has to work the handle with his hand while balancing the bag on that arm and then slide it open with his foot and hipcheck it the rest of the way, and there is again nothing about it that allows reverence or dignity. It’s as ungainly and without grace as carrying any heavy object ever is.

A footman spots him staggering down a narrow, red-carpeted hallway, trying to keep either end of his burden from bumping the stone walls. “Need some help there, sir?” he offers, even though he was bustling with the purpose of someone going somewhere specific.

Tarvek certainly could accept. He can only tell what he’s holding because he knows, and either way the staff don’t ask questions or share information, because of how severely it isn’t tolerated.

“ _No_ ,” he says coldly, drawing the heavy bag just a bit closer to him like he’s ready to wrestle it from anyone who tries to take its burden from him.

He walks past the footman, keeping his steps steady, neither speeding up to disengage from the conversation faster nor staggering from the awkward weight he’s carrying.

He finally gets to the room where dangerous material is left to be gathered for incineration. It used to be a kitchen, or something. Him and Anevka used to come here, when they were small, because it was full of strange and mysterious things, most of which weren’t even that dangerous.

He levers to his knees and puts the bag with his sister — with his sister’s _body_ — on the ground at the base of a dresser with two missing drawers and odd stains.

That’s it.

There isn’t anything else for him to do. This room is cleared out every evening in the summer, its contents moved one room deeper by workers who don’t ask questions into a furnace that heats part of the underground network beneath the fortress.

So this is the end of his task. He should go now, and be available if anyone inquires after him.

When he starts to get up he finds himself overcome with wrenching, heaving sobs. He falls back down to his knees. He slams his hands over his mouth and shoves his tongue between his back teeth and bites down to cut off the wails and whimpers trying to force their way up his throat, and then sits there, breathing in a wet, choking way. Tears and snot course down his face as he just thinks, thoughts hot and sharp as a bloody wound, and after he’s been at it long enough to soak his handkerchief he shuffles the sleeves of his indoor coat up over his hands and covers his face in those.

Then he gets up, walks out, and closes the door behind him. He marches away and up to his quarters. He breaks down a few times on the way there, in bursts that last only seconds, interspersed with more ruining his sleeves trying to keep his face explainable.

He gets to his room. He takes off his coat and shirt and throws them over a chair to be picked up. He puts on different ones in the same colors.

He goes to breakfast. He’s late. The clank is there, folding its hands and surveying the table without eating. The empty palanquin is behind it. All the day-to-day bustling in the room feels absolutely inconceivable. He feels hollow, and remote. He wants to tell everyone to stop _chit-chatting_ , resistant to leaving his own moment of observation.

“There you are, brother mine,” the clank greets him. “Try the cream before it goes off.”

-§-

Tarvek finally gets to breakfast after Anevka has been socializing faux-idly for the better part of an hour. He looks _terrible_. His skin is pale, and his face looks like he’s been scrubbing at it.

 _Are you quite well?_ she wants to ask, but there’s company. “I take it your projects are all going as expected?” she says.

“Oh, yes,” he says, sounding much more normal than he looks. “...It’s all as expected.”

**Author's Note:**

> I was trying to work on _Neutral Element_ immediately after some bad shit went down in my life, and I found I had...too much! Inspiration. About dead bodies. What was meant to be a single line with darkly speaking implications multiplied into two descriptive lines, then two gratuitous paragraphs. At that point I accepted that it wasn't a good time, deleted the morbid additions, and gave the corpse feels their own file to run rampant in.


End file.
